


Collision Principle: The Rolling Ranch

by MadamMortis



Series: The Collision Principle [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Death, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Eventual Romance, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Recreational Drug Use, Romance, Sexual Violence, Slow Burn, Some Humor, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 00:17:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14580795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadamMortis/pseuds/MadamMortis
Summary: Three months prior to the events of the Collision Principle, a strange ship appears off of the East Coast of Boston.Left stranded upon the high seas following the events of the Great War; this ancient luxury cruise liner continues, against all odds, to make its rounds of the once proud nation from which it heralds. In the dark of the night, lights beam from its upper deck. People are seen to be passing by the rusted safety railing. Propellers spin and thrum beneath the churning water; powered by some unseen source...All eyes from the Commonwealth rest upon its weathered hull with suspicion and greed. Desperate to learn the secrets as to how this mighty ship continues to fuel its eternal voyage.Evelyn Hallows has another agenda. Word has travelled to Boston from along the East Coast; whispers of a ship that spirits unwary souls away. She is determined, with the help of those she travels with, to uncover the truth behind these mysterious disappearances.Fortunately for them, the Rolling Ranch is a lady all too ready to share her secrets.It's surviving long enough to tell them, that is the true challenge.(Female Sole Survivor/Hancock primarily).





	Collision Principle: The Rolling Ranch

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: I do not own Fallout 4, any of its characters and or concepts. In case it was obvious, I write fanfiction. I urge you not to bother with the suing of me, as I have very little to offer you in the way of apology. Cheers.
> 
> A/N: Well, hey there my Freaky Darlings! Something of a change of pace. Before continuing with Part 2 of my main story, The Collision Principle, I have decided to pluck out the piece I have been putting off for some time: The Rolling Ranch. As it is, I may even commence Part 2 of Collision Principle whilst writing this; write both in correspondence. Rolling Ranch is ironically intended to be a short piece, however. I aim for roughly five to six chapters max. We’ll see how that goes. (A mocking laugh at ones inevitable eating of hat).
> 
> The Rolling Ranch was an oft mentioned event that the main characters in the Collision Principle experienced some months prior to the time in which the main storyline is set. Though not directly referenced, characters continually allude to what they endured and how it continues to effect them and shape many, if not all of their decisions in the current day. I had originally planned to make this a short piece that was included in the main story but realized that there was simply far too much stuff to break down. It would be far long and intrusive if I were to place it within the main content of Collision Principle but it is a story that I wanted to tell nonetheless. So, here it is. In all its nasty, pretentious, stomach churning glory.
> 
> For all new readers who haven’t done so already, I would suggest reading Collision Principle first, so as to have some concept as to the characters and setting. If not, maybe take a look at it after this? Long and painful as reading the damn thing is!
> 
> WARNINGS: The Rolling Ranch explores things in much more violent and graphic detail than Collision Principle. It contains extreme violence, graphic descriptions, physical and sexual abuse, torture and… well, any number of equally unpleasant things. Naturally, such things can be extremely triggering and if you have concerns with viewing such material, I strongly advise that you either refrain from doing so or, if you find yourself triggered by anything you have read, please seek support and or speak with someone that you trust. Warnings will be presented at the start of every chapter. Please take care of yourselves. 
> 
> All my love  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo

 

> _“For the evil man has no future; the lamp of the wicked will be put out.” **~ Proverbs 24:20 ~**_

 

** John Hancock **

**_Off the coast of East Boston – Two months, two weeks ago…_ **

The air was bitter. As cold and as pitiless as the lash of a whip. And more Heavenly for what it offered than a celestial choir of hymen conserved angels.

We paused a moment we didn’t have. Breathed it in. The stink of low tide, of Radgull crap and Mirelurk spooge. I fancied I’d never smelt anything so wonderful in my life; even as a child when my Ma had baked Tarberry cookies for my birthday and the whole house smelt of warm, crumbly biscuit. The seaside wasn’t a scent you would bottle if you could help it but we savoured it with as much delight as I had that balmy afternoon as a child; nose hiked high and proud to whiff impatiently about our shacks tiny kitchen.

After all, when you’re locked up like less than an animal and substantiated on the smell of piss and blood and whatever god-awful muck comes out of a human body; you learn to appreciate the little things.

I turned to her; put my mouth as close to her ear as I dared. We were weak enough now to not give two shits about contretemps but I worried that if I leaned too close that I would collapse on top of her. And a hell of a thing that would be; given who was in pursuit of us. We’d come too far to go and fuck it up now.

“Listen…” I said, reaching up and bringing her hair back behind her ear; pulling strands out from the dried blood that not so much dotted her face as slathered it. I wanted to clear the line of her sight but there was little to help with that, given that one of her eyes was swollen shut. “When I hit the water… I’m probably gonna pass out…”

Eve tightened her arm around my waist; leaned her forehead into my chest. She’d been supporting me as such ever since she’d wrestled my ass up out of the lower docks of the ship; though I suspected she had likely just as little physical strength as I did.

“It’s okay…” She whispered, her lips forming a tired line across her face; like a knife strike running through the swollen verge of a Mutfruit. “I got you…”

I’d lost count of the number of times I wished I’d kissed her. Not a one I regretted so strongly as that moment. Who was to say whether we would survive so much a minute longer? We were on borrowed time. Bleeding out, eyes beating desperately to disparate black spots that pricked at them from every angle, wounds too numerous to count and too terrifying to consider. If it was in fact my time to shuffle off that mortal coil, I can’t imagine having ever regretted anything more than not having kissed this amazing woman. A woman who, in spite of the tremendous, mortifying risk involved, had braved immeasurable dangers to come after me; when for all intents and purposes, she believed she might only ever have retrieved little more than a flayed and mangled corpse.

Looking at her, there in the steel hatch of that damnable ship, I knew without a doubt that I had never loved a living soul quite as deeply as I loved her. And that even with her face and body a pulped and heartbreaking mess of blood, bruises and shattered bones, that she was easily the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

 _I’ll kiss her,_ I decided, _when we’ve both made it out of her alive. Perhaps not in one piece, but alive._ It would give me reason enough to keep pushing forward; in spite of the pain, in spite of the impracticality of my condition. The infected weeping lashes, the hank of skin and muscle secured only by the strip of material Eve had torn from her gray dress and wrapped about my chest. How either of us mustered the strength to continue moving, I can’t pretend to know. Even now.

I pressed my hand through her hair and gently laid my lips to her temple. Paused only long enough to savor the moment for if, god forbid, one or both of us should fail to survive the fall. Gently cupped to her bruised and beaten cheek; ducked my head to stare into her eye. Through the glassy haze of pain and repression, I fancied I chanced a glimmer of that irrepressibly strong spirit which was as much a part of her as is the bark which encases the trunk of an equally obstinate tree.

“Ready?”

She gave an ever so tiny nod; her bruised, swollen lip hitching up gently in one corner. “What choice we got?”

We held tight to one another; shuffled to the lip of the hatch and slid our legs down over the side. The cold steel burnt through the seat of my pants; lit the lashes to the cheeks of my ass as though they were bare flame. There was no wasting time after this; we couldn’t risk being seen from the patrolling forces on the deck. Eve hadn’t time, or likely strength even, to waste on her fear for heights. We pushed off, doing our best to keep a hold of one another and our feet pointed towards the water. It wasn’t a dramatic drop by any means; a little over thirty or so feet. But to our ripped and mangled bodies, it may as well have been fifty.

The salt water enveloped me like a wave of vinegar; sousing every bleeding, pus riddled gash with blinding pain. It muddled my brain, forcing my mouth open against my express desire to keep from doing so and I barely got a hand up to cover it before taking in water and drowning myself. Those black dots punctured my vision, bleeding together to form a thick black curtain, behind which my consciousness sank like a stone dropped unceremoniously into the choppy waves of the ocean.

It was Eve’s screaming that jolted me back to the waking world. I shook beads of water from my vision, whipped my head around in an attempt to gauge what was going on. Water was erupting in small, sharp bursts around us and a series of piercing whistles lay painful siege to my ears. Eve’s arm was around my neck and she was towing me back towards the ship; using the underside to keep us sheltered from above. Another whistle and then sharp, agonizing pain ripping through my foot. If the water hadn’t been so dark around us, I knew it would be thick with a cloud of blood. My cries mixed with Eve’s and I managed to force myself about to cover her as best I could; pressing her body into the slimy, algae ridden tow of the ship. My foot screeched angrily from where the bullet had passed through bone and muscle but I forced myself to ride it out as best I could. Understanding all too well that Eve’s symbiotic screams meant that she too was sharing my pain.

“Oh God… No, no, no, _no…_ John, I’ve been shot… _I’ve been shot again!!_ ” She screamed, spitting out irradiated sea water as the waves schlepped doses of it into her mouth. And then, she was crying good and proper; sobbing and wailing her despair and I had my arm around her, my remaining hand clutched tight to what I gathered was a decorate rope feature they had loomed to the side for purely artistic purposes. Bless the evil bastards and their pointless, decadent indulgence for aesthetics.

“Munch, where’d you get shot? Where’d they shoot you?” I urged, pressing her still tighter to the side of the boat as bullets continued to patter the choppy water about us. It was a windy, drizzly day you see; which might in fact have been the only reason we’d survived as long as we had. Bastards couldn’t get a good enough bead on us what with all the muddle of the sea foam and rocking of the ship.

“I felt it… hit my _hip._ ” She blubbered, pinning her palms in tight to my chest; bobbing like a cork as I fought with what strength I had to hold us in place against the side of the boat. I couldn’t blame her any. It had long since breached the point of reasonable, that we ought to continue on preserving some fictitious element of strength we just didn’t have. “I-I-I think it passed through but… oh John, they’re not going to let us go, are they? They’re gonna kill us… oh god, we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die…”

It was hard to argue with her way of thinking. This was a situation that even an able-bodied person would be hard pressed to wrangle their way out of. And we were quite literally on our last legs, as was. Down a few necessary quarts of blood, operating on little more than adrenaline and unimpeachable loyalty for the other. I pulled her tighter to me; wash equal with fury and devastation. I knew the world was far from a fair place but I couldn’t help but rail with that childish ideology that screamed it _wasn’t_ fair and that we had _fought_ so hard and _deserved_ so much better.

I thought of Goodneighbor and all the folks waiting for me. I thought of my sister and my mother and the pain that my death would bring them. I thought of Fahrenheit and felt safe in the knowledge that at the very least, Goodneighbor would have someone strong and solid and steadfast to watch over it. That was _something_ , at least. It was something…

I sighed deeply and felt in that passing breath, a great deal of strength leave me. I pressed my head to Eve’s; embraced her in that tumultuous blood patterned water and felt ever so strangely that I might simply away to sleep. How much easier would it be to allow that weariness to steal up and convalesce the corners of my brain. To ease aside the pain that for so long now, had been a constant, agonizing blanket; draped heavy upon my every waking moment. I quite honestly had forgotten just how it felt to live without discomfort and couldn’t imagine that I would ever be quite the same again; for mentally, my mind and heart were as brutally punished as my already damaged and radiation mangled flesh.

How fine would it be, to simply hold her, keep my heart pumping for so long as it took for her breaths to still and then allow myself too, to drift away?

It was this thought alone, that pricked from hiding that last, elusive stroke of determination that had been until now buried deep in the reserves of my being. For my dying was as certain a thing as it was that McDonough would scoff another bowl of noodles within a half hour of having devoured the first. But Eve was still a young woman; with a kid to get back to. A kid who needed his mother, regardless of what manner of mother she supposed herself to be. If the only good thing I had ever done in my irreverent, self-indulgent, waste of a life was to get this girl out of here alive, then god dammit I would. Even if all that remained of me was shreds of flesh; I would drape it over her in the hopes it would at least weather some of the chill from her bones.

“We’re not giving up.” I told her, my voice as obediently firm and encouraging as I’d hoped it to be. “I don’t know how yet, but we’re not giving up, you understand? Even if we gotta hang here until help comes, I’ll just keep a hold of this here rope and you keep a hold of me. I ain’t gonna let you go.”

She sniffled; her body trembling, her face turned sideways against my chest. “I’m losing the feeling in my legs, John… my fingers are t-turning blue….”

“Put your hand up against my mouth.” I instructed and bit back the terrible ache that lay siege to my heart as Eve placed her broken, mangled fingers up against my lips. I blew heated breaths against them, doing what little I could to warm the damaged extremities.

“Don’t give up.” I whispered, words that seemed to worsen what little constitution she had, for she sobbed hardest yet; one good eye pinched so tightly shut it wrought jagged lines through her forehead and temples. The cries themselves were silent but the heaving of her breath which left her in a pained whine were somehow worse. “Not just ‘cause you got your son to think about, Eve. You gotta live ‘cause you deserve it. Yeah? You got a lotta folks care about you; wanting you to come home. Can’t be lettin’ them down now, can ya?”

“It’s no different with you.” Eve insisted, sniffling and blinking one very red veined eye at my chest. Some clarity in this though; some strength in even denouncing what claims I’d paid to her virtue. Typical stubborn creature, she was. “You’ve gotta get back to Goodneighbor… they need their mayor; they need _you_ , John. Please, you need to survive; you need to survive for _them._ If it comes down to it, _please_ just leave me, _please, please, please…_ ”

I pulled her in hard and tight against me; fought through the pain that such contact undoubtedly brought us both and pressed my lips to the slim line of her forehead that wasn’t bruised. “What? You reckon I’d go and leave you after you came all the way into the asshole end of Hell just to yank me on outta it? Sorry, kiddo. All for one, one for all. Made your own bed when you started actin’ all noble and shit.”

I stroked a hand to her head, reaching out through the water with my legs and wrapping them about her own. I pulled her to me; thigh to thigh, groin to groin and chest to chest. Touching everywhere. An intimacy we’d never cause to broach before but necessary to both keep us together and keep us warm. The water, though not freezing, was hideously cold and would only worsen as the sun started going down. Without our mutual body heat, we weren’t likely to last very long. I was extremely grateful (though quite honestly, not for the first time) that Eve had large tits. They condensed a good amount of heat between us. To say nothing of how soft and comforting they felt. Her whole body, in fact. I tried to convince myself that such a thing were happening under better circumstances; that we were not huddled under the mould riddled undercarriage of an evil ship, but curled up safe and sound somewhere in a nice warm bed. Snug and cosy and blissfully tired after having made some good love. I might have almost believed it; if the chill from the water hadn’t been such a deterrent and the pain just that little less intrusive.

I kept myself busy with my daydreams; breaking them on occasion to give Eve a rouse and make good and certain she wasn’t slipping away from me. We were down there much longer than I dare to imagine. Misery is such a strange thing; for when you are free of it, you never quite remember to just what depths that unhappiness went. All you know is how much better you feel afterward; a relief so poignant it makes your knees weak and your mind bubble like a freshly cracked bottle of Nuka-cola.

The sun had started to set by the time the bullets ceased plipping about us and despite my having swapped my arm over on a number of occasions, both felt as though they were about to fall free of the socket. Eve had offered to hold on for us both and give me a break but she was only able to use the one arm (nursing a gunshot wound to one shoulder) which quickly put her out of commission. I think it was by pure magical will alone that I managed to keep hold as long as I did; fearing that at any moment that one of those bullets would run us through in just the right place…

And then…

A sound from above that I can only describe as… _gargantuan_. The unfamiliar resonance of steel being rent apart with as little difficulty as a child tears a piece of paper in two. Of glass shattering, concrete splintering with as much resistance as dry clay. Distraction enough to turn the tide of bullets away from the two of us and towards whatever was causing the resonance. A split second in time that I instinctively knew was ripe for the taking.

“Evie, darlin’; you listen to me now. We gotta get while the gettin’s good. Okay? Come on!” I yelled and in case this wasn’t incentive enough, I kept her under my arm; loosing my grip on the rope and steering myself through the water as best I could with what little strength my limbs retained. Limbs that prickled all the while with pins and needles; reparation for the time we had remained inert and freezing beneath the bow of that awful ship.

Regardless of what pain she was in, Eve wasn’t the sort of person to put others at risk for the sake of being a whiny bitch and managed to muster strength enough to perpetuate some awkward semblance of swimming. We were forced to part from one another; close enough still that her breath could light upon my ear but I felt the worse for not being able to hold her to me. Debris from whatever the hell was happening above was splashing down around us; dangerous in and of itself but providing some additional coverage for which I could only be thankful. I adopted a sort of lazy side stroke, keeping my right arm extended in the air above Eve’s head; some meagre protection against the shrapnel. I couldn’t get a good enough glimpse as to what was going on above deck but I could only hope and pray that our friends weren’t a part of it.

When my toes brushed the mushy, barely there bottom of the shoreline, I could have wept with relief. Instead, I put all my effort into heaving Eve up out of the drink; trying to keep as much weight off of my injured foot as possible. It was a pathetic attempt at best and we managed little better than a couple of aged turtles might; hurling their crustacean riddled asses up a steep, stone rimmed beach.

Our trembling hands worked one after the other to clasp a hold of the sea softened rocks dotting the shoreline. If luck favored us, they held firm and permitted our weight to rest upon them long enough to ease ourselves up and further forward. More often than not, it was like ice skating uphill and the rocks ended up skittering and buckling beneath our near deadened weight; providing as much purchase as a sodden wad of tissue paper. Of course, if we had been fit and well enough to have managed it, we would have put our heels to the grindstone and bolted for the radiation riddled hills like a couple of mongrel dogs on the receiving end of a good kick. But this was all we had left in us.

Excruciating minutes, perhaps longer even; fearing for the bullet that might at any moment shatter the backs of our skulls and render our brains to soupy, indistinguishable mush. I could only pray that it would be me first; because I doubted I had strength of heart enough to deal with seeing Eve drop, bleed and never again draw breath. How long it took for us to drag our exsanguinating asses up the beach I don’t pretend to know but it was however long too many.

But at last, we succeeded in heaving our dripping, bedraggled bodies as far up into the sand dunes as possible; not resting until we had ascended the highest hillock and only then permitting ourselves to collapse and roll down it like so much carpet before the diamante bequeathed toes of some old world celebrity. It was the first moment in so many thousand moments since we’d entered that terrible place, that I allowed myself to feel the most infinitesimal crumb of relief. So rich and piquant however, that it was genuinely painful. I lay there, face turned up towards the evening sky; smelling the not-so-fresh air, feeling the sand stick to the myriad of injuries striped upon my everywhere and walked my fingers over to where they could sink between Eve’s and link together. Not even the Ranches greatest sniper could poach us from here. We could, for now at least, just sit and breathe and bleed. She smiled at me; almost radiant in her relief, in spite of the dotting of bruises and anguish adorning her face.

A face that all too quickly turned to palpable terror.

_Click-click. Click-click._

I twisted to look over my shoulder; at the hunch shouldered visage of the determined, implausible, _impossible_ figure that approached us through the frame of the surrounding dunes. No man, save for Adrian had stature such as that. Nor in possession of such awful eyes; one a blue I could only describe as resembling the slated side of an iceberg perched upon an ocean that reflected in turn a cloud dappled day. The other, tattooed in such a fashion that it might have resembled my own; only that the white of the pupil bled out to form the shape of an upside down cross. A procedure I came to understand was not unfamiliar in the world from which he came but one that never failed to strike fear into my heart. Just as surely as it had done all those years ago; in the darkened, mildew ridden bowels of the Statehouse…

_Click-click. Click-click._

What parts of my body not already rent solid from the cold sting of the water, turned to ice further still at Barbados’s approach. Seeing that he had our undivided attention; the corner of his lip curled and twisted like a dying worm. His right arm snapped down; with the dexterity of a switchblade being snapped from the recess of its handle, displaying the wicked, shining sickle of the hook he kept pinched between his middle and ring finger. All that remained to him of his youth; a trapper, born and raised deep in the womb that was the radiation drenched forests of Far Harbour.

I didn’t think I had it in me to stand, but love it seems is as powerful a motivator as fear itself. Together, it formed a potent elixir; such that my limbs seemed to take on life of their own. Even with a foot, pierced through with as near delicate precision as an earlobe and bleeding quite unapologetically; I was up. And as ready as I would ever be. Nothing more than a sharp rock to my name and quite surprisingly aware of the fact that I was about to die and worse. To say that I was terrified, would be an understatement. But I felt further still a ferocity quite unparalleled; a want to protect that made me feel quite ironically as bullet proof as I plainly wasn’t and ten feet taller than my reportedly humble frame.

“Oh God… oh God, _no…_ ” Eve moaned like a wounded animal, struggling to her knees with shaky, trembling limbs. She pitched a rock of her own, which fell plaintively short of its goal; bouncing away far to the right of Barbados’s booted feet. Undeterred, she threw another. And another. Face pinched into such a heartbreaking juxtaposition of anguish and desperation all the while. “ _GO AWAY!!_ Leave us alone, YOU MOTHER FUCKING _BUTCHER_!!”

Barbados might have smiled in his approach but such gestures were more the ilk of his partner and there remained nothing of warmth in the moments that followed. His near translucent brows caved low over his hideous eyes; the branch like tattoo’s traversing his cheeks, pinching in tight about his mouth as his teeth clenched. That steel jawed, grinding I so readily associated with extended Psycho usage. He was pinging out of his mind and ready to do some serious damage.

“Did you little cunts think you could just slip on out and that’d be the end of it?” He hissed, raising his right hand so as to rotate the shining blade from side to side. I don’t think he had blinked the once since rounding up on us, whereas I was fighting so much as I was able to keep my eyes open and my bladder sanctioned firmly shut. “When’s it gonna sink into yer thick heads? Eh? You’re _property_. You _belong_ to us _._ We decide when we’re gonna dispose of ya.” He flicked the tip of the hook over his lower lip; drawing it slightly from his black, tattooed gums before permitting it to spring back into place. His left hand cupped his groin and squeezed. “And we is far from done with ya’s yet.”

I eased my head about on a muscle strained neck to stare at Eve; flinching to see the puddles about her body stained red with blood. I swallowed the meaty lump that rose up in my throat; prayed to all that was holy that I could stop trembling for just two miserable seconds.

“Eve… get outta here. Crawl if ya gotta; just… get the hell out of here.”

She stared back at me through her remaining blood shot eye; shook her head obstinately. “No, John… John please, we have to go. Let’s just go, let’s just run and leave him behind… the both of us, _please_.”

If I thought I could have snorted without caving in a few more of my ribs, I may have done. Because realistically, what chance did either of us have to outrun Barbados? Even in the best of health we’d be lucky to make a dozen or so yards. And now we were starved, exhausted, nursing shock and innumerable injuries; some of which might very well have proven to be fatal. If we tried to escape now, he would catch us in a matter of moments and kill us both. And we’d be lucky if it was quick.

At the very least, I could act such as the pebble that might inadvertently roll the ankle of an unsuspecting traveller and slow the bastard long enough for Eve to get the hell out of dodge. Find someone who could help.

“Evie, you listen to me: You gotta go. You got your kid to think about! Just _go!_ ”

Of course, as to be expected; this was not reason enough for Evelyn Anne Hallows; stubbornest madam to be found in the great wide Commonwealth. “I’m not going without you, John! I already lost you once! I can’t lose you again, not again!!”

“Goddammit Eve, would you _fucking listen to me?!”_ The scream razed my throat but was nothing compared to the pain that rocketed down through my arms as I threw them up; just barely blocking the strike that Barbados levelled at me. If both my feet had been in state fit to endure it, I might have maintained my balance but the gunshot wound meant I couldn’t distribute my weight evenly. I tipped backward, floundering; my ripped and flailed back striking the sand bank with such violence my vision went black and my screams were cut off only by the wave of bile that gouged itself violently out from my stomach. I was choking, curling in on myself like a dying Molerat and just as helpless for it.

Barbados raised the hook, would have sunk it directly into my frontal lobe; such as he had done so many of his victims through the years. But Eve got in the way; tackling the monstrous prick about the middle like an old-world Gridiron player. In possession of her full strength, she might very well have succeeded with driving him back, but she was weak as a kitten and screaming all the while from the pain that the violent assault had wrought throughout her own injured body.

“Get the fuck off of him! _Get off of him_!! You leave us _alone!!_ ” She shrieked, shoving with her hands; kicking and punching like a small child throwing a temper tantrum and just as effective for all the damage she caused. An act of pure desperation; one which would have touched me deeply, if not for the rampant terror holding court in the gallows of my body.

I could see it coming a mile away, was choking through bile and trying to get to my feet so as to prevent the terrible thing from transpiring. But not fast enough.

The hook struck Eve in the back, ripped through the gray fabric of the smock styled dress she was wearing and pierced her skin. He made to tug back violently but she reacted with instinct; reaching up, taking a hold of his wrist and pushing herself towards him. She managed to suspend his arm long enough to pull herself free of the point of the hook; like a coat slipped free from its hanger.

A clever manoeuvre but not good enough. Barbados was strong, fit and crazier than a sack full of rabid molerat’s. He had no modern misgivings as to how a man ought to treat a woman and had in fact nursed a brutal, burning hatred for Eve since the moment we stepped foot aboard that evil ship. Weeks of pent up rage finally out an outlet on which to unleash itself.

He hit her. And he held nothing back.

Her head snapped violently on her neck, blood bursting from her nose to form a film of powder in the air. She toppled like a felled tree, screaming; her once tiny nose now a blooming red flower in the midst of that terrible garden of bruises.

Barbados came with her. Pinned her down; such as a moth to the canvas of a cruel, unfeeling collector. The hook pierced through the palm of her right hand; purposeless exempt to cause her additional pain. How could he pin her to sand, after all? As usual, the evil bastard just wanted to hear her scream and he wasn’t the least disappointed for what the act derived.

He looked over at me now; the first proper grin I had seen since he had rounded up on us. “Bet ya thought I couldn’ta hurt ya more than I did all those years ago, Johnny-boy.” He said and ripped then the hook from Eve’s hand. He flipped her, so she was down on her belly; sobbing open mouthed and keening into the rapidly reddening sand. The steel ripped apart the back of her gown; another awful tableau of bruised skin peeking through the serrated edges of fabric. A bleeding gash; parted like a pair of sinuous lips, from where the blade had gouged her. The red of her rose tattoo looked brighter than ever amidst all the black and blue of that once perfectly bronze flesh. _Hope breeds eternal…_ “Thinkin’ I knows a way now, boy.”

I thought I had learned something of horror in those seemingly endless days trapped within that hellhole. Never will it cease to amaze how a body as old as mine can experience a feeling entirely new. Virginal terror; a sensation far removed as to what I might otherwise refer to as simple emotion. As vile and as tangible as poison; one which I had never before tasted, so as such, possessed no immunity to. It struck as fell and as demonstratively as a burning blade; those terrible eyes gleaming rampant hunger, Eve’s bruised cheek sunk to within the bloodied sand, blonde hair tangled and snarled with blood. She screamed from behind the lashes of that one good eye; such as I myself had done all those years ago and it would have been enough just to have some idea as to what Barbados intended. Worse still, to know firsthand. To see in her collapsed desperate visage, the face of the man I had once known as John McDonough.

And to know that I would sooner die than have her suffer the torment and humiliation that he had gone through.

With what strength remained to me, I pitched forward; landing across Eve’s back such that I was certain it would knock the air from her lungs. I thrust my arm down along her body, over her rump and between her legs; grabbing a fistful of the material that draped her groin and pulling her up tight against me. I used the bridge of my arm as a means to inhibit access to her both her vagina and… well, need I say more? It reserved precious little of her dignity to have gone ahead and done such a thing but better still than what Barbados had planned, of that I have no doubt.

And you can bet he was infuriated with me for it too. Easy enough as it would have been for him to have simply tossed me aside and continue with his abuses, Barbados chose instead to indulge his vinegar laced temper.  The curl of the hook punched through my ruined back, sinking in so far as to violently jolt my body when he yanked it back out. Again, to the thick band of flesh below my neck, a ferocious sidelong slash then to rip through the material bound about my torso and loose the flap of skin and muscle barely tethered to my body by the most infinitesimal band of skin. Into my hip, scraping bone, piercing my biceps, my forearms, ripping further still what little remained of my back that wasn’t pulp. Every time the blade connected with me, it felt it could not have been the worse should I have allowed the Haberdasher finish me off. I couldn’t even begin to describe the pain to you. There are no words.

There must have been a very great deal of blood because what little I could see of Eve was drenched red beneath me. Pinned, unable to free herself from beneath our combined weight; she sobbed. Begged. Pleaded with me to move, to save myself. My blood snaked down, bubbled and burbled across her lips. May well have drowned her; for her arms were pinned and she was unable to wipe herself clean.

Her voice faded; replaced first by a low, muffled drone. And then, a ringing sound; so piercing it might have split my skull in two, had the pain from Barbados’s assault not taken precedence. I can’t honestly recall how I had ever survived such a thing. Nor can I remember in exact detail, the extremities of the pain itself. Simply to say that it was… indescribable. Such that I had no expectations of my ever surviving the event. I tried to be as immovable and unfeeling as a boulder; unflinching beneath the pickaxe driven continuously into its side. Yet knowing all the while that it was untenable; that sooner or later, I would be either unconscious, dead, or in pieces. Eve needed out from under us long before then; with time enough to put distance between herself and Barbados’s immoral intentions.

I attempted to shove her out from underneath me with my arm but quickly discovered I hadn’t the strength to bat so much as a dried leaf along the ground. I had lost far too much blood and my body was rapidly weakening. I attempted to tilt myself over towards Barbados; so as to ease my weight off of Eve and give her room enough to crawl free but it was all such an awful mess. Arms and legs and limbs and blood all tangled together as indistinct from the next as rainwater is to the lake into which it has fallen. Eve failed to help her cause either; so tasteful yet moronic was she in her moral bend. She remained a rictus of flurried, panicked confusion; trying all at once to pull me along with her and then to twist herself around so as to deflect Barbados’s attacks. Her bare legs; peppered with black and yellow bruises bicycle kicked the air to either side of his waist, failing to land but a single blow for the wedge our bodies provided.

Barbados attempted to yank my arm away on a number of occasions; to pin it back so that he could continue his assault on Eve. I filtered what little strength I had down into that arm; soldered it with the mental fortitude of steel and clasped my fingers tighter to the material about Eve’s waist. I was probably cutting into her but it was far preferable to the alternative. I gathered she understood as much, for she never the once afterward berated me for it. Little difficult to figure out what the madman’s intentions were, after all.

Barbados likely hadn’t expected me to put up as much of a fight as I had; especially considering the state that I was in. His next strike was his hardest yet; the hooks tipped point penetrating my right side. I felt a deep, arterial scraping and then the strangest sensation of all; the sudden, inexplicable absence of air from within my lungs. My mind was a blazed jumble of murky confusion but amidst that mental snarl one thought knifed to the forefront of my consciousness with chilling clarity; that internal scraping had been the blade passing between the bones of my ribcage. The reason I struggled for breath, was because its point had pricked the exterior of my lung. The organ had collapsed. My borrowed time had just transgressed to a mortal degree comparable to that of debt collection.

A stertorous rattle blurted from the depths of me; blood splattering over my lips and down my chin. Speckled the back of Eve’s already stained head. She sobbed, her good eye going as wide as it would go and called my name. A desperate bid to pull me back from the encircling burrow of darkness that was slowly working its way in to frame my consciousness. No… no this couldn’t be how it ended. I couldn’t die, not yet, not _now…_ Barbados would… he would…

Red dots bloomed suddenly across the expanse of the madman’s chest; as though an invisible needle had pounded the line of his body. His shoulders bucked, one at a time in response to the assault and, as the ringing in my ears came to recede some, I came to understand that the dots appeared in correspondence to the firing of a weapon. A jagged red strobe followed shortly after; force enough to throw the hulk of a man ass over twit, his massive visage sprawling ungainly upon the wet sand.

I must have lost consciousness temporarily because the next thing I was aware of, was blinding, splintering pain impaling my side. I was getting a little more oxygen in however and as the black dots cleared from my eyes I could see one of Eve’s many broken fingers wedged into the hole Barbados had left between my ribs. It was her lying over top of me now, her remaining arm wrapped about my shoulders and her hip arched over; left leg providing some manner of meagre protection. My face she pressed tight to her chest; an eventuation that under normal circumstances would have caused me no never ending degree of joy. Now, all I truly felt was the need for her embrace; her comfort and the warmth she radiated, swathed liberally as we were with enough blood to fund an All you can eat Vampire convention. I swallowed back the thick lump in my throat, tried to keep breathing around the blood I knew for certain was pooling in my lungs. Glanced about for where Barbados had gone.

It took a while to make sense of what I was seeing. So peculiar in and of itself that it would have given my relatively sober brain pause for thought. Preston Garvey of the Commonwealth Minutemen at one side; firing his Laser Musket into Barbados’s chest, whilst Paladin Danse of the Brotherhood of Steel offloaded his standard issue Big-Guys-With-Small-Penises-And-Need-For-Compensation-Minigun into every other part of the evil bastard that Garvey failed to leave burnt and blistering.

You would think it would be enough. And from the look of shock that flashed across Garvey’s face as Barbados’s hook came flipping through the air towards him suggested that he thought the same. That the man could do anything but spasmodically twitch after enduring such abuse was mind boggling. Let alone fling a solid steel hook with as little effort as it might have taken a child to pitch a newspaper onto someone’s front porch.

Danse’s power armour clad arm whipped about; clipping the hook from the air and sending it into a wild, flying saucer like twirl into the sandbar at our backs. His thick brows pressed so low over his eyes I thought he might have succeeded in pushing them even further back into his skull than they were already set. He looked about as shocked as an expressionless, toadying bigot could look.

“What the hell are you?”

Some of the bullets must have connected with Barbados’s head, because blood had filtered down to outline each of his large, tombstone like teeth in such a way as to render his beastly grin ever the more unsettling. I think one of his eyes was out; from what little my own blurred vision could ascertain and I knew full well that he was riddled with more holes than a third generation dart board. No one should be smiling under such circumstances. But then, who could accuse any of these bastards of being normal?

“You stupid fucks still don’t get it?!” He jeered and I felt Eve verily twitch and shiver along my side, as fragments of shattered teeth spurted from between Barbados’s barely there lips. All the worse for the fact that he didn’t seem the least bothered by the colossal nature of his injuries. “So long as the Captain draws breath _this_ ship ain’t sinkin’! And neither are any of the souls she’s collected!” He slapped one of his giant, blood drenched hands to the wall of his chest; unconcerned with the impact he made against his wounds and laughed. “Now I don’t know if you Brotherhood Boys are the bettin’ type but I’m thinking five to one odds that you ain’t got bullets enough in that there fancy rig of yours to put me down for anythin’ more than a light nap.”

Now I didn’t see it myself, given the state I was in but from what Eve later told me I can count myself lucky I was on the outer with this one. Because according to her (and I wasn’t at all sure I would have believed it, if Garvey hadn’t validated her story) Barbados had then reached up, scooped his fingers into the mess that had once been his eye and pulled it free. Bad enough in and of itself but it’s what happened next that scared the ever loving shit out of the collective sum of us.

Wherein the once bloodied hole that was home to the ruined slop he just extricated, another eye pushed forward; bearing that self same styled upside down cross tattoo. Just as surely as if there had been another waiting in the reserves all along.

Brave men would have shot for the hills at such a sight and I would not have blamed them in the slightest. It was a testament to Garvey and, much as it begrudges me to admit, Danse himself, that the pair of them remained rooted to where they stood; keeping that creepy fuck in their crosshairs in a time when all natural instinct would be to void your bowels and bury the barrel in your own chin. I think Barbados had convinced each of us, beyond doubt, that he was the most likely contender to survive this here encounter and in credit to their integrity (and some would say, stupidity), Danse and Garvey remained there between this monstrous, bullet pocked titan and us.

I couldn’t begin to imagine how things might have turned out, if Danse hadn’t received the radio message at that time. Some garbled nonsense I couldn’t begin to make heads or tails of but something that resonated deeply with Barbados when nothing else had. His thin brows shot up into the tattooed ridges of his forehead and he twisted about at the waist; staring back over his shoulder towards the ship. At a ship that appeared, at least from my impacted perspective, to have been ripped in two at the stern…

“Jesus fuck… _Corinth…_ ” He hissed and then, in a series of loping strides that made me think of an old world Kangaroo, he bounded away; off towards the right and likely back towards where the ship had been docked. Danse made a movement as though he intended to offload a few rounds into his scarpered back but Garvey waved his arm with such violence that I think it convinced him that the idea was a poor one. The last thing any of us wanted was the crazy asshole to swing back around and finish the job he'd started.

Just as soon as his back had blotted into nothingness, Eve burst at the seams; squalling with all the poise and dignity of an overtired, tit-deprived infant. An awful sound to be sure; more a wretched, gape mouthed howl, which spoke in compliment to her relief and to the stain of hopelessness that had seeped deep into the very fibre of her being. She reached for Garvey, with the one hand she wasn’t using to stopper the hole in my side and did little beside drape her fingertips down the front of his coat.

“Oh God, Preston… Danse… _thankyou._ Oh thank god, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou…”

“Jesus Christ…” Garvey murmured, a sickened expression on his face as he holstered his rifle and all but ploughed both knees through to the centre of the earth as he slid in beside us. “Eve… is that you?”

I felt Eve’s head make the barest hint of a nod against my own. “It’s me… yeah. And this… this is John. John Hancock, I mean… Preston, _please…_ please for the love of God, get us out of here, _please…_ ”

“We have to move.” Danse urged, wasting precious little time with cheery platitudes. “There’s an airstrike coming and we’re well within blast radius. We need to get as far from the beach as possible.”

“I don’t think we can… move anymore…” Eve murmured, her voice such a genuine tone of contrition that it made me laugh. Which was a very bad idea, as blood bubbled up from my lungs, lodged in my throat and sinuses and made me feel as though I might be drowning. And strange though I’m sure you think it, the sensation was not entirely unwelcome. Given that my entire body felt as though it had been based in salt and hurled upon the surface of the sun, anything that served as a momentary distraction was a fine one.

Preston’s eyes darted offside for barely a moment and then he was leaning in, dragging Eve’s arm up around his shoulders. She shrieked, because of course she was in a lot of pain but most of her railing off was to do with me and her insistence that I be taken care of first. Foggy though my head was, I understand Garvey’s reasoning perfectly and as suspected it was Danse’s reluctant tin can that got the dubious honour of dragging my rapidly extinguishing ass out of the line of fire. The Power Armour packed some extra sauce, so we managed to outstrip Eve and Garvey at any rate. The way she was hanging limp about his shoulders like some old sweat drenched sock made my heart ache in the most awful way. How much longer did she have? Did _I_ have, for that matter? It made less sense in fact for us to be alive than it did Barbados; in spite of his being chock block full of bullets.

I didn’t have much left in me but I managed to knock my fist against the back of Danse’s power armour; a weak effort that I seriously doubted he would have taken much notice of. Especially not when the man was in the midst of running for our collective lives. But I tried anyway. I tried to muster up some miniscule reserve of strength; pushed it up and out from some far-flung corner of myself and soldered it into my voice.

“Ya won’t… need much convincin’…” I said, as sure of the statement as I had ever been about anything. “But when it comes to the crunch… save her. Don’t care what kinda fight she puts up… leave me here if you gotta. Just save her.”

I might have died then; so easily I slipped away from consciousness. I could no more control such a thing then I could have reached into the sky and swivelled the moon about in its orbit. By some immeasurable, incalculable fortune of fate however; I woke from that dark pit, to something so cataclysmic I could no sooner call it a sound than I could call a pattern on a plate a sight for sore eyes. An explosion, I surmised; consisting more of movement and of heat than of anything else. I woke, I discovered, because Danse had been lifted from his feet and thrown; with as little resistance as a rag doll. I too had been hurled from his grip and from the renewed pain throbbing throughout my ribcage, coupled with the secondary evidence of the tree trunk I was curled about the base of, I could only assume I’d been slammed chest first into it.

If I’d been any fit state to laugh, I might have done so until I’d burst; so ridiculous it seemed for one body to bear the brunt of so much abuse and to still resolutely keep on kicking! My mother had always said I was a stubborn bastard but oh boy, what an understatement it was!

Whatever tiny pleasure I had gleaned from the absurdity of my situation was lost at the sound of Eve. She was screaming my name, over and over; voice wrought with desperation. I so badly wanted to go to her; to hold her and to calm her as I once had done but there was no means left to me to do such a thing. Whatever part of my brain that was wont to produce energy was seized up; the gears rusted long past the point of repair. Too much blood… too little blood rather, ha. I wondered how much longer it would take before my organs started shutting down? That’s if they hadn’t started doing so already. Couldn’t have been in the best nick, given the shit I’d put them through… Chems, alcohol, cigarettes… Wonder they hadn’t given up the ghost long before now…

That slip in time once more. Cold wind violently buffeting the razor blade edges of my wounds. A pair of warm hands on either side of my face. Eve now. Closer. Much closer. Nice to have her this close. Should have said something a long time ago. To think what we could have shared, if I hadn’t been such a gutless wonder. I waited too _damn long_ …

“John… John, hey… you gotta stay with me. Okay?” She was staring down at me with a weird, manic smile on her face. A face that looked all too much like a melon that had been left forgotten at the bottom of the pile for some weeks and then flipped over to find the underside bruised and rotted. I half expected to see flies come buzzing from the bloodied splodge that had once been her pretty, petite little nose. “Danse has got us a Vertibird. He’s gonna get us outta here. There’s a medic… It’ll be okay. You just…” Her hand stroked by cheek. Desperately. She’d seen my eyes flicker shut again and it seems she couldn’t abide the sight. “You need to stay awake. Okay? _Stay. Awake_.”

I felt her puffy, cracked lips press to my forehead and in spite of the fact that her mouth had never looked or likely felt worse, I thought it the most wonderful kiss I’d ever experienced. If I’d had it in me, I would have reached for her, dragged her mouth down to mine. As it was, I couldn’t lift so much as a finger to touch her.

I didn’t want to scare her; so I forced my eyes open, turned my throbbing, bitten lips up at the corners. “I’m awake… Munch…” I said and she moaned softly, pressing her face against mine. I could still feel the blades of the Vertibird slicing air somewhere behind us and prayed to a God I hadn’t spoken to in who knows how long that they would pull their fingers out and get Eve inside. “Wouldn’t go and check out on ya… not after you went and pulled that big old rescue mission, eh?”

I grazed my lips against the side of her face; it was what little I could manage. I needed to talk quickly. Something was sneaking up on me; something I had never felt before. I had to say what needed saying before it arrived and stole from me whatever chance I had to set things right.

“Eve…?”

The fact that I said her name as such was not the reassurance I was hoping it to be and Eve succumbed immediately to sobbing histrionics. Her hand stroked the side of my face harder; as though she were attempting to slough my cheek clear of the bone.

“No… you don’t start talking like that. John, we’re getting outta here.”

Only one side of my lip was working now but I forced it up all the same. It probably looked a little grisly but it was better than laying there looking all maudlin.

“I know, darlin’. I know.”

“You don’t get to do that.” She sniffed, her voice so muffled and gurgly from the condition of her nose that she was barely understandable. The look in her eyes was unmistakable, however. “No. You don’t. Not now, not after everything we’ve been through. Dammit, I’ve lost _enough!!_ ” She drove her face down into my bare chest; something that had horrified me months earlier, when she’d hugged me in the bathroom block of Outpost Zimoji. Her shoulders twitched responsively to her sobs; blood leaking afresh from the bullet wound in the left. “That fucking bomb fell and I lost  _everything!_ My home, my friends, my son, my husband, my… my _Dad!_ And now... now  _you too?!"_

All that fear and emotion and loss was spilling out of her now; as though driven out along with the blood that failed to stem. Her broken, mangled fingers flinched against my chest. Trying to keep a hold of me with as much success as an eager child clutches a fistful of sand to their heart and attempts to carry it home with them. For all the determination and good intentions, there is nothing to be found but remnants of grit and shell within the lines and creases of the child’s palm; as insubstantial as air and all too easily whisked away by it.

“I can’t lose you…” She hiccupped; her broken nails pinching to my flesh as though they were staples that would keep me pinned to the waking world. I felt another tug, followed by a subterranean skip somewhere deep inside of my chest. Eve’s fingers flexed again; as though she too, were privy to these internal stirrings. “I can’t do this without you, John… I _need_ you. Please don’t die. Please _God,_ I’m begging you, _please don’t take him from me…_ ”

I thought it very ironic, that for my long life lived in contrary ambivalence of death, that I were to suddenly find myself so very unprepared for that mortal ‘trip’ I’d waxed many a times nostalgic over. And though I wasn’t certain I shared my mother’s beliefs, I turned my thoughts temporarily to the prospect that there was perhaps someone infinitely more powerful than the evil monsters who had held us captive these past few weeks. Someone of immeasurable kindness; who could read my soul for what it was and would demonstrate some clemency to a man who, though not a saint, had done his very best to have lived the most moral and decent life he knew how. Was it enough to pull a favor? Who the hell’s to say. But I had to give it a crack anyway.

 _If you’re listening… you know how many times I’ve wanted to die in the past,_ I though, wishing all the while that my eyes wouldn’t tear the way they were. I put an extra prayer forward, in the hopes that Eve wouldn’t look up and bear witness to me as such. Such a thing would end her, I feared. _But… I’m wondering… is it okay to change my order now? Because I think… I think I’d prefer it, if I could live._

I whet my lips; considered further still the delicate nature of my situation and projected my thoughts out into the void once more.

_But… if you have to choose which one of us to save… I think it’s safe to say that it shouldn’t be me. If there’s only one miracle to be had today, let it be hers._

Whether it was God who made the metaphorical handshake, or just mere coincidence I cannot say but the sharp pain that raced along my arm and pierced the left side of my chest like a burning blade was answer enough.

 _Guess not,_ I thought, feeling against all odds a tired, acquiescing smile form at the corner of my lips. What cosmic irony it was, after all! To die now of all times; now, when I had something so terribly wonderful to live for. I might have laughed, should it have been possible. Years I’d spent thumbing my nasal cavity at the prospect of death and only now when I’d slammed the door shut and clacked in the dead bolt did it deign to come a knocking.

I had heard that a heart attack was never much fun and it took much more than I was certain I had left, to keep smiling my crooked smile at Eve and prevent her from feeling the convulsions that seized my body like the malignant grasp of a frustrated Behemoth. If this was some sort of exchange, then that was all well and good that I should die in order for her to live. I was tired anyhow. Flush with regret true, but ever so exhausted by it all.

I was in her arms. That was enough.

**~**

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Just so as to make it clear, I am telling the story from back to front; with the characters looking back over their experience within the Ranch over the next few chapters. It's an annoying little trope of mine.
> 
> I'll probably work on Part 2 of the Collision Principle soon but with any luck, I hope to continue working on these two stories in tandem. Thanks to all those who took the time to read. If you like, leave a comment or a kudos or do a little dance in a pair of frilly lace knickers or whatever else takes your fancy. I'm open to most interpretations of appreciation, so whatever floats your boat, really ;) 
> 
> Just so that you are all aware, I do not plan for this story to be an exploitative horrible gore fest, full of nastiness and revulsion. There are some full on themes that I explore but I do honestly consider it to be very much in the same storyline as Collision Principle and though I do wish to tell the story for what it is, I have no plans to revel in the extreme nature of some of the events. I do actually intend to have moments of humor, romance and all the usual fluffiness I have in CP. So, there's hopefully some good to be found in this story too :) 
> 
> Thanks again everyone and I do hope that I am finding you well and happy. Big hugs and kisses to you all and I look forward to seeing you in... well, whichever comes out next!
> 
> All my love  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


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